This summer's focus is all about helping clients get a better grasp of their web content. Building a website is not a one-and-done operation. It takes a great deal of maintenance and a deep understanding of your users and their goals. So how do you, as a content editor, know what the user wants? The first step is understanding your monthly analytics report.
In this post, we will break down each section of the report to give you insight into what the data can tell you. There may be some marketing terminology you are not familiar with; please reference the Matomo glossary for a high-level definition of these terms.
Let's dive in!
Visits Summary
The visits summary gives a snapshot of your site's traffic from the previous month. Use the graph to find dates in the month where you saw spikes in traffic and determine whether this was the result of a successful marketing campaign or an outlier. Over time, you may find that some campaign techniques work better for reaching your audience than others!
The summary report includes a breakdown of visitors entering your website and their actions. 
The unique visitors metric tells you how many new users visited your site that month. The difference between visits and unique visitors will tell you the number of returning visitors. Having a large number of unique visitors can mean that your marketing is paying off and driving new leads to your site. Having a low number of returning users could mean your site is not delivering the content your users are looking for. It's important to have a good understanding of the purpose of your site to determine which areas you need to improve.
The actions metric can be telling of your website's ease of navigation and whether your calls to action (CTAs) are converting. Conversions happen when a user performs a desired action such as a click or a download, resulting in a site goal. Depending on the goals of your site, you may want to adjust the content to drive more conversions!
The bounce rate tells you the percentage of your visitors who land on your site and don’t complete any other actions. In some cases, this could mean they are finding the content they are looking for upon arrival. Think about what content updates you could make to get your visitors to stay and explore your site, or return with future questions.
Device & Browser Report
Giving your users a great experience is arguably the most import part of maintaining a website. How do you ensure that you're doing this? By knowing your users. If two thirds of your site traffic comes from mobile devices, but your structure and design are desktop-first, a majority of your users are not having a good experience! When adding new content, be sure to test in multiple device and browser types to ensure it is displaying correctly.
Visits by Day of the Week
If you are responsible for implementing campaigns that drive traffic to your site, this report can be helpful when determining best launch times. If you notice that most conversions happen on Mondays, it may be worth targeting your users on Monday morning to increase goal completion. Consider this information when making improvements or updates to your site content as well!
Actions
Dive into your actions report to determine what your users are looking for on your site. Actions are how the user interacts with your website. It can be a page view, internal site search, downloading a pdf, or clicking an outlink, taking them to a new site.
Page URLs
The page URLs report will tell you the content that is getting viewed the most. This information can be very powerful. 
Determine the most important pages to your users, and optimize them to give the visitors what they want. Make sure this content is easy to find and not buried deep in your website. If there is content that is not performing as well as you hoped, consider what updates you could make to drive more traffic there.
Entry & Exit Pages
The Entry Pages report tells you the first page the majority of your visitors landed on. The Exit Pages report tells you the last page visitors viewed before leaving your site.
Site Search Keywords
Often visitors will use the search feature on your site to find the content that answers their questions. Searches are the number of times a visitor performed a search on your website's search tool. The search results pages show the number of times people clicked "next" when searching that particular keyword. The percentage of visitors that leave the website after searching for each keyword are shown in the percent search exits column.
Keywords with No Results
If you have a keyword that returns no results but has a high number of searches, this may indicate content that your site is missing.
Outlinks & Downloads Reports
The Outlinks and downloads reports give you a good idea about which links on your website are interacting with the most. This information can be used to determine what your users are looking for and clicking on your site.
Pages per Visit
Pages per visit lets content editors know how often visitors extend beyond their initial landing page. Having a high average pages per visit indicates that the average visitor on your site is interested in learning more and exploring your site beyond the initial page they landed on.
Channel Type
The channel type report shows you where site traffic comes and includes a 
breakdown of how much each source type interacts with your website. This information helps to understand the type of visitors your website is receiving. It's typical for over 50% of your site traffic to come from search engines. Because of this, you want to be sure that your content is optimized to display correctly on search engines (SEO). There are many ways to improve your website's SEO, which we will cover later this Fall.
Websites
Following the channel type report is a websites report. This report shows you the websites referring traffic to your website most often.
Goals Overview
For those who have goals in place, the goals overview report shows data on whether your website is successfully converting visitors. As you continue to make improvements to your website content, you should be course-correcting to see your goals metric increasing. Visit the How to Start Goal Tracking with Matomo post to learn more about setting up goals for your site.